Rughooking by Elizabeth Martel

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Dyeing the Background for Althea

I have the background underway, and I’m still procrastinating about the face and the flesh tones.

I’m still debating about removing the face altogether (except the lips, one eye and the ear, which I like) and redoing it with a newly dyed batch so I have enough of the same colour to do the whole thing…..since I can’t seem to match this colour. SOOOO…while I dabate this dilemma with myself, I’ve gone on to the background.

I got out a variety of existing yellows from my stash, and thought I’d try transition dyeing to blend and mix the various yellow tones.

Well that was a raging failure! They certainly match some better, but are still way too far apart, and don’t have blending sections so that I can merge them while hooking.

I knew I wanted a gold colour with some depth to it, so I found a yellow I liked in the sample colours from the book Jewel Tones, which I had borrowed from the Sunshine library. I decided to start by dyeing 1/2 yard. Simple….except that the Jewel Tones book is written for 1/3 yard of wool ripped into two – 8 tone swatches, and the one I liked called for the dyes yellow, sun yellow, golden yellow, and chestnut brown. I have neither golden yellow or chestnut brown.

Not to be deterred by the fact that I had the wrong amount of wool and the wrong dyes, I forged ahead. I checked my prochem swatches, and decided that cantaloupe would do for golden yellow, and chocolate brown wasn’t too far off from chestnut brown. I mixed it in two colour baths as per the instructions, and from then on …went my own way. I put half of each dye solution in the dye pot, added the wool and spooned the other halves over the wool later when much of the colour had been taken up. I didn’t actually stir, but moved the wool around enough so that the colour differences blurred.

This is what I ended up with, and I’m delighted. (it’s all carefully written in my recipe book so I can re-create it)

Off I went to a hook-in on Friday and started the background.

As usual, I jumped around to see how the background would look. I started doing it against the darker sections.

You would have laughed if you’d seen me trying to get a picture of the whole thing on Saturday morning. It was hanging up in such a way that to get the entire piece in the photo I had to half stand in the middle of the bed, leaning this way and that to try and get it straight on.

I fell over several times in my attempts, and the dog thought he should come to my rescue and lick my face, or make this into a great new game. There were a multitude of shots like this one….chopped off and not straight on.

Finally! A straight-on shot of the whole piece. Whew.

I should get lots of hooking done this week with the Briar on every day. I’m the world’s most avid Television listener.

3 thoughts on “Dyeing the Background for Althea”

Well, you’re not easily daunted, that’s for sure! I wish I had your confidence with the dyeing. Looks like you eventually had wonderful success with the rich golds you ended up with and yes, it was funny to imagine you trying to balance on your bed to get the photos!jill in Ontario

Ha ha …Jill it’s less confidence and more reckless abandon I think. I do check out the effects beforehand by dropping a bit of the dye bath on a paper towel…which gives a relative approximation of the results.